


Until It Sleeps

by oceansinmychest



Category: Wentworth (TV)
Genre: Allegory, Demons, Hallucinations, Inner Dialogue, Joan-Centric, Metaphors, Near Death Experiences, One Shot, Post-Canon, post s5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-28 12:36:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13904169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oceansinmychest/pseuds/oceansinmychest
Summary: Joan fights to escape her fate.





	Until It Sleeps

**Author's Note:**

  * For [The_Saint](https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Saint/gifts).



> Special shoutout to The_Saunt for inspiring me to write this one. Months ago, you sent me the music video to Metallica's "Until It Sleeps." This is what transpired. You're such a chill, down-to-earth person, and easy to get along with. Cheers!
> 
> What I wanted to focus on was the ambiguity of season 5. I wanted to expand upon that scene, as painful as it might have been to witness. My intent was to explore a near-death experience on Joan's behalf. Her psyche and characterization in the later seasons is a stark contrast to early seasons so I toyed with that a bit.
> 
> As such, the heightened use of metaphor applies to this visceral experience that's a bit like vivid dreaming.

Beneath a mound of dirt, death ensures insipid self-reflection. Crucified for her deeds, she stirs within these cramped confines. Wood shavings from the box lick her cheek. Bloodshot, weary eyes flutter about. The taunt vein in her neck is as tense as the hangman’s noose. Always dirty, never clean, clumps of soil fall onto her face.

Joan Ferguson has always known herself. Her grand Machiavellian scheming ensured the truest course. It’s the long game that she has meticulously played. A villain dies a fiery death no matter the trial. This, she knows. One way or another, she has foreseen her ruin.

So now a legend's buried six feet under.

You expect calm composure from steel incarnate. Now is not the time. Her mind switches to instinct. In her indignation, Joan screams. She swallows the dirt. The acrid, chalky taste clings to her teeth until she’s chewing on grit. Slipping through the cracks, beetles scurry along the bottom part of her coffin. She feels defiled, _unclean_ , the need to purge all too great. She scratches until her nails break and her cuticles slice. Blood slithers down her bent fingers. Brewing for months, for years, everything falls into a perfect state of disarray. Now the bargain’s been signed with blood.

Crimes stack upon crimes. It’s Judgment Day. Behold her mighty reckoning.

This isn't revenge in Bea Smith's name. This is fucking _murder_.

Scrape, scrape. Skin breaks. Her knuckles ache.

Surrounded by pitch blackness, this is her reckoning.

Her complicated history with Mr. Jackson lands her in the hole.

A pair of suture scissors lay near her throat. With a flick of her wrist, she strikes a match. The tantalizing flame quivers and dances. An animalistic panic causes her to flinch. The sketch of Queen Bea shifts into Slater’s scathing stare, now replaced by her father’s judgment, and finally, Warner’s bulging eyes offer no consolation.

A well-bred, refined woman has been reduced to _this_. Madness in kings is a literary trope, but in Governors? Unthinkable.

_I am not insane. I am perfectly in control._

Her curled fist meets the makeshift coffin’s lid.

**Thud.**

You’ve seen this scene a thousand times. Even now, it makes your skin crawl.

Losing oxygen, her time trickles down like sand in an hourglass - bit by bloody bit. She’s struck a second match. This, too, could end in flames.

A worm transforms into a snake, wriggling by her stained tennis sneakers. They lose their immaculate whiteness - stained like the rest of her. Like Schrodinger’s cat, she’s floating somewhere in between: neither alive nor dead.

This is Hell.

Delirium is achieved through the steady exhalation of breath. Deprived of breath, these false illusions conjure. Her haphazard mind whirls together broken images and muddied allegory. Lashes flutter. Sleep tempts like a veritable devil. Her lids grow heavy, but this is no admission of defeat. Done and dusted, the second match drops. Momentarily, she sacrifices herself to the dream.

There’s a deficit in her.

When Joan wakes up, she notices that the teal’s been swapped for her impeccably tailored uniform. In medical, she places two gloved fingers to her twin, pursed lips. An aberration with black, black eyes scrutinizes her. Staring at her reflection reveals a ruinous thing in teal with a barbed wire halo to adorn her neck.

She hears Derek roaring inside her head, “Drop the noose.”

The prisoners - the women - they laugh at her. Call her an abomination. A **freak**. The audience has a first-class ticket to bear witness to her ruin. She can hear it. With a tightened throat, Joan swallows. Shows no weakness.

Growing tense, she utilizes this hour as her unsung confession.

“I must be sick."

But the nightmare changes. Demons want to give her a proper good bye. Her long, lithe legs carry her up Blackmoor’s winding stares. Deputy Governor Ferguson transcends Jacob’s Ladder. Akin to a doll, her Jianna falls into her hands. The leaden weight of Jianna in her arms is as crushing as the dirt piling on her wooden grave.

“Jianna?”

She whispers her name as if it’s sacred, as it’s archaic, as if saying it for the sake of saying it will destroy everything.

In her arms, her beloved Jianna shifts to look up at her. Soft, innocent eyes call to her. It crushes her gilded heart, but she hears Anderson’s voice when Jianna moves her lips to speak.

“I never loved you.”

The memory slowly fades. The weight of the body in her hand becomes no more. Grains of sand trickle through her fingers, naught but a dream within a dream. It's not real. None of this is.

“No...”

A tear shatters her marble façade. Plagued worries manifest. All her sins come back to haunt. In the box, an imaginary mouse gnaws at her exposed, marble wrists. At the offense, she flinches. She gasps. Paranoid, darkened eyes flit around her surroundings. Swallowed alive in eternity, it’s like a jolt of oxygen. Specks of dirt continue to trickle down and wash over her.

_You insipid vermin. Think, think, think…_

An attempt to recollect herself results in failure. Instead, she finds herself in a tournament at the fencing studio her father had once taken her to. No matter the parry, her movement and poise amount to nothing. A childhood full of tension, anxiety, and expectation gobbled up the ghost she once knew. Ivan Ferguson had been a reputable monster, but monsters rear monsters. So it goes. Even now, she isn’t good enough. He hectors and bullies her. She feels small. Insignificant. Was this how Vera felt on the day she moved away her hand?

The scent of wood shavings brings her back to the present. She is the serpent that devours its tail: endless like a halo of freshly sharpened no. 2 yellow pencils. Gritting her teeth, she curses her predicament: that shiv had been her gavel.

In her delusions, she likens herself to Christ at the stations of the cross. The crimes inflicted upon her are forgotten by those who do not - _cannot_ \- understand so there's the need to vilify. Who will weep at her feet? 

She imagines Jodie Spiteri with her bleeding eyes. Antigone’s father would have done the same. How she shaped and reshaped that fragile, broken thing into a practical woman. She pictures her sniffled at her feet, bent in a perfectly subservient pose.

Surely, Vera - her Mary Magdalene with tears so crystalline every time she anointed her through the blessed kiss of a back-handed slap. Instead, her sweet lamb plunged the knife of protocol into her back.

_I trusted you._

Slight and subtle, her lip twitches. Delusion conjures up an infant’s wails. Her bloodshot eyes struggle to pinpoint the side. Her pale, bruised cheek rubs against the scissors. The metal warms to her touch.

_I saved a child’s life. I’m a hero._

Addiction comes in many different forms. The right becomes the unlawful wrong. Joan has always loved breaking things for the sake of breaking them. You can learn your enemy by dismantling them. Snapping Iman's neck had been a pleasure, if only to witness the dismay etched across Doyle’s once smug face.

With the demolition of her former position, Vera’s iconoclasm brought her to the point of no return. Her right hand betrayed her. Fed upon her power. This is the thanks she receives. Betrayal stings.

_I have made the decisions no one else had the courage to make._

Where does she fit in? Where does she belong?

There’s a resilience to her character. She wants - _needs_ \- order, structure, discipline. Reminiscent of the flames that ate away Warner’s body, she suffocates again. Feverish, sweat beads along her strained brow. No, this place will not be her prison. A phoenix burns again.

Joan strikes the third and final match. Smith grins back at her, preserved in a charcoal sketch that the little star fucker hoped to preserve as a memento. She rips the paper from the roof. _Enough_.

Reborn again, inner demons dare to sleep. This wooden tomb won’t confine her. Escape is eminent. Dear dictator rouses herself from her tortured mind.

_Dead men tell no tales._

She raises the hem of the sweatshirt so that it functions as a makeshift mask to protect her face. Iustitia wears a veil at last. With her limited air supply, she relies upon the right of action. The weight of the earth bows the top board down. Her dying light begins to fade.

Akin to a viper, Joan strikes. Over and over again, she kicks the board beneath her. Wood splinters. It digs into her skin. Small chips surround her. Beneath the force, the planks buckle. They groan. Soil fills this cramped space. She smells the moisture collecting in the air. It tastes like rot.

One last thrust grants her the reward she’s sought after. Like an animal, her hands scurry. She pushes the dirt towards the corners. More trickles in. The act repeats itself like the mistakes that ridicule her flawed design.

Propelling her leg upward, her foot fractures Heaven’s ceiling. Her body feels sticky, tainted. Survivalism urges her own. With the hole above, she finds her sanctuary. Her bloodied knuckles thrust through the threshold.  The living dead crawls out.

May her wrongs create no trouble.

With an exerted grunt, Joan pushes past the massive branch and casts aside the idea of Eden. In greedy gulps, she drinks in the air's humidity. She savors every moment. Still, her trembling fingers leave scratches in the ground. A succession of three, but it will never remove the hurt.

Fragmented branches rival a crushing ribcage. These things cut her in the same way that she denies every proverbial harm inflicted upon her. Rid of composure, she lingers on her knees. Her spine weeps. Her forehead thanks the damp, flattened blades of grass which she now clutches between her raw finger tips. She sucks in the nighttime air through heaving gulps. Freedom's a temporary farce unless she continues to game.

So, she'll pull herself together again.

This wasn’t who she was meant to become.

**Author's Note:**

> P.S. She gets out. ;)


End file.
